Posts Tagged ‘daydreaming’

“Managing Your Attitude” is the title of a chapter in Scott Adams’ How to Fail At Almost Everything and Still Win Big.” Adams writes, “Your attitude affects everything you do in your quest for success and happiness. A positive attitude is an important tool. It’s important to get it right. The best way to manage your attitude is by understanding your basic nature as a moist robot that can be programmed for happiness if you understand the user interface.” This is a geeky way of saying that you control your thoughts and by controlling your thoughts you are able to manage your attitude. This point has been made in previous healthymemory blog posts.

Although Adams makes no mention of this, the best way of managing your attitude is via mindfulness and meditation, about which many posts have been written. Here are some tips offered by Adams. “A simple trick you might try involves increasing your ratio of happy thoughts to disturbing thoughts. If your life doesn’t provide you with plenty of happy thoughts to draw upon, try daydreaming of wonderful things in the future. …If you imagine winning a Nobel Prize, buying your own private island, or playing in the NBA, don’t worry that those things are unlikely. Putting yourself in that imagination-fueled frame of mind will pep you up. Imagination is the interface to your attitude. You can literally imagine yourself to higher levels of energy.”

However, if you are in a truly bad mood, exercise, nutrition, sleep, and time are helpful. Once you return to you baseline level of happiness, you’ll be in a better position to get the benefits of daydreaming.

Adams also writes, “A powerful variation on the daydreaming method involves working on projects that have a real chance of changing the world, helping humanity. Adams tries to have one or more change-the-world projects going at all times.

Adams also correctly notes that smiling makes us feel better even if the smile is fake. When you’re in a bad mood the physical act of forcing a smile may trigger the feel-good-chemistry in our brains that is associated with happiness.

This smiling-makes-you-happy phenomenon is part of a larger and highly useful phenomenon of faking it until you make it. He says that two-way causation can be found in a wide variety of human activities. He’s discovered that acting confident makes you feel more confident. Feeling energetic makes us want to play a sport, but playing a sport will also make us feel energetic.

Adams notes the there is a bonus to smiling, “as it makes us more attractive to others. When we’re more attractive, people respond with more respect and consideration, more smiles, and sometime even lust. That’s exactly the sort of thing that can cheer us up.”